The striate cortex is the source of two major, corticocortical, multisynaptic visual pathways. One of these follows the course of the superior longitudinal fasciculus, interconnecting the striate, prestriate, posterior parietal, and dorsal prefrontal areas, and appears to be important for spatial vision. The other follows the course of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, interconnects the striate, prestriate, inferior temporal and ventral limbic areas, and is critical instead for object vision. Our research concerns both pathways, but the accompanying report focuses on the second, or ventral one. Our studies suggest that each of the extrastriate links in this ventral pathway adds a different capability to object vision, making possible, in turn, highly efficient object perception, object memory, and object-affect associations. The sequential dependency of these behvioral functions is paralleled by the sequential dependency of the successive neural structures in the chain. The somatosensory cortex may also project through a ventrally directed pathway to temporal limbic areas, and parts of this system may perform functions in tactual perception, memory and affect analogous to those described above for the visual system.